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Why are so many athiests "liberal?"

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Since the focus here is atheists and why they gravitate toward leftism rather than leftism in general's workings and motives, I think a lot of it often comes down to a false dichotomy between package deals. The left and right are two bundles of political positions and motives and treated as the only options. The "right" bundle contains religion, so seemingly the only option available for one looking to get a bundle without religion is the "left" bundle. Embracing Political Bundle Option A (leftism, as a whole) becomes equivalent to rejecting Political Bundle Option B (rightism, as a whole, with its religion in there).

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The "right" bundle contains religion, so seemingly the only option available for one looking to get a bundle without religion is the "left" bundle. Embracing Political Bundle Option A (leftism, as a whole) becomes equivalent to rejecting Political Bundle Option B (rightism, as a whole, with its religion in there).

This makes sense for why atheism correlates so much with leftism, but I don't think it quite answers any motivations. Why are they prone to package deal - is it just most atheists? I would say it's -most- atheists, but I don't think the intellectuals package deal in this way. Dawkins goes on about science extensively, and that makes his atheism - the method of thought is all focused on immediate evidence rather than a wider principle. "God has no evidence, so he doesn't exist, just look, science shows it! Checkmate, theists!" It easily translates to looking only at immediate effects to determine actions. Then his legions of followers mimic him and package deal from there.

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"Why are they prone to package deal - is it just most atheists?" It's not that atheists are especially prone to package deals, more so than other groups, it's that people in general currently are prone to it and atheists as a group are just at least not enough of an exception to this susceptibility to keep it from playing a big part in the politics of many of them. I'm not saying either though that this explains all of leftism for all politically left atheists, just that I think it plays a big role in how leftism became/becomes the dominant political position among atheists overall.

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While my own, subjective, experience agrees with the OP, this thread has caused me to wonder.  Perhaps there are an untold number of non-liberal (or, perhaps Jeffersonian liberal) people like myself, who just don't participate.  Is there any data to support the original premise?  Are more atheists liberal?

 

The question I raised ignores the fact that the definitions of "atheist" and "liberal" are not as closely related to individual person's concrete ideas of themselves as you might think.  If some data set proves the OP, that may just be a function of liberals and atheists don't think deeply about ideas.

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While my own, subjective, experience agrees with the OP, this thread has caused me to wonder. Perhaps there are an untold number of non-liberal ... people like myself, who just don't participate.

Perhaps. Perhaps some microorganism is brewing in the Amazon as we speak, which will ultimately render the whole thing moot. Perhaps the question itself offends the violently tapdancing Venusian Unicorns.

If we have evidence of something then our is to explain it; not to look for evidence that disproves it.

"[An arbitrary idea is] a sheer assertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality.

If a man asserts such an idea ... his idea is thereby epistemologically invalidated."

-Peikoff on the arbitrary.

Furthermore, while it's not so much an explicit error, you seem to imply that "my own, subjective experience" isn't sufficient to make an educated guess about it and that's a particularly damaging mistake, if you leave it unexamined.

Doesn't your knowledge of the OP come from such subjective experiences? When Galileo spoke about his insights into the motion of pendulums, wasn't he referring to a vast sum of such anecdotal evidence? Isn't that the basis of everything you know?

Embrace the anecdotal. :thumbsup:

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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Accepting the arbitrary unquestioningly and accepting anecdotal evidence unquestioningly aren't the only options. There's good reason "anecdotal evidence" is generally treated with some suspicion. Anecdotal evidence is generally a term used for evidence from others, not what one witnessed first hand. All possible confounding factors of anecdotal evidence: People lie, people don't recall things accurately, people have experiences that are a-typical, people don't well convey what they witnessed, people jump to inaccurate conclusions about what they saw and report those conclusions as exactly what they saw. This is why replication of experiences, multiple identical witness accounts, and other corroborating evidence is important for big things like scientific discovery validation and throwing people in the slammer. Some of these confounding factors apply to things one personally witnesses too, but not all of them. This doesn't mean we have to always just doubt everything, but rather that some things are more prone to involving more factors than we'd see immediately and thus merit some further inspection often before calling the case closed. Things involving large groups of people are often subject to people not recalling all members encountered as well as other particular members and/or witnessing mostly or entirely a-typical members. This kind of mistake has happened in such situations plenty of times before, so it's not coming out of left field to think maybe there could be a similar mistake again here. I think we've probably got enough info that our conclusion that a majority of atheists are politically leftists is sound, but I don't think it would be a bad thing to double check with a really well done poll or something similar if somebody decided to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Got a nice answer to this question from the Peikoff podcast today:

 

Dear happiness,

There is no philosophical or logical connection between atheism and Leftism, if by Leftism you mean socialism or bigger government. The only political implication you can logically deduce from atheism is a negative one, in that it negates any God based politics, e.g. a theocracy. Atheism is simply the negation of a belief in God, so it doesn't imply any particular politics.

There is however an (erroneous) historical connection between atheism and Leftism due to Karl Marx being an atheist and many of his opponents being Christians who (erroneously) opposed him on religious rather than philosophical grounds. So atheism became (erroneously) coupled with Marxism and consequently with Leftism, and its opponents became (erroneously) coupled with religion.

This coupling was disastrous because it allowed communists and Leftists to portray themselves as scientific "progressives" when they were no such thing; and to portray supporters of capitalism as being stuck in the religious past, when capitalism was in fact the most radical advance beyond that past. It was left to an atheist advocate of capitalism, Ayn Rand, to point out what a perverse distortion this historical coupling was.

Best Regards
John Dawson

Edited by happiness
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Christianity has made morality in the west equivalent to altruism in the form of a mystic and intrinsic code (word of God). 

 

Atheists, although they have been able to give up God, and mysticism (at least they think they have) tend to take the orphan morality of altruism and simply make it intrinsic.  These folks have either grown up Christian or at least have been raised in communities which have been heavily influenced by Christianity for many centuries. The majority of Atheists in the western world (I would estimate) are simply Christians without a God.

 

The idea of morality as objective, based in the facts of reality, and which is essentially a morality of rational self-interest would be so foreign to them as to make them claim that objective morality is simply nothing like what any kind of morality actually is.

 

If you tell them the good is "giving", the community, the planet, that any great hero must have sacrificed something, and that certain things are good "just because", as you cannot get an ought from an is, well then, NOW they'd have something to identify with.

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